Egg Donors

We’re using #TBT (Throw Back Thursday) to count down the top ten all time most popular posts here at CBC-Network.org. This week’s entry, #5, is a warning and plea on egg donation. From “Thinking About Donating Your Eggs? Think Again” The egg donation process is inherently risky, from beginning to end. What are those risks? […]

As I’m sure you know by now, we’re using #TBT (Throw Back Thursday) to count down the top ten all time most popular posts here at CBC-Network.org. This week’s entry, #6, is an egg donor’s first-person account of her experience. From “Experience of an Anonymous Egg Donor:” I volunteered to harvest eggs for a friend, […]

Here is a new resource we’ve developed in order to highlight and provide references to medical and scientific literature on issues that arise in third-party reproduction. The information is divided into three sections that address: Health and psychological risks to women serving as egg vendors or surrogates Health and psychological risks to the children born […]

Ounce-for-ounce, human eggs are the most valuable commodity in the world — if you are beautiful and intelligent. Why, young college women at elite colleges receive tens of thousands for delivering a microscopic product to would-be parents who don’t just want a child, but one beautiful and smart enough to suit their high standards. That […]

Egg donation just got a whole lot sexier (soft of). This news article from the UK’s Dail Mail is a couple of weeks old, but still worth a mention. A new website, Premier Egg Donors, features Facebook style ads for potential couples looking to hire an egg donor for their potential child. Among the women […]

We all know headlines are meant to sell news, so we are right to read articles through a discerning lens and even some healthy skepticism. We are also wise to consider the source. Is this a trusted reporter? Is this a reliable journal, paper, or author? You can imagine my sense of outrage when last […]

In an October 15th article, Bloomberg news reports that “Bodies Double as Cash Machines With U.S. Income Lagging.” Among the many ways Americans are looking to make money during the financial downturn are selling their hair, breast milk, and, unsurprisingly, human eggs. The article profiles a popular fertility clinic in the D.C. Metro area where […]

Connecticut’s leading fertility center, CT Fertility, run by Dr. Michael Doyle, has announced the launch of a new “Donate and Preserve” program. The program offers repeat egg donors the option to save some of their eggs for their own use later on, should they have problems conceiving. Recognizing the highly educated egg donors in their […]

California Governor Jerry Brown has vetoed AB 926 — against which I warned last May — that would have permitted biotech companies to buy eggs from women and embryos from IVF companies. From his veto message: Not everything in life is for sale nor should it be. This bill would legalize the payment of money […]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Pleasant Hill, Calif. (August 14, 2013) — We applaud California Governor Jerry Brown for his leadership in vetoing AB 926 yesterday. This bill would have allowed women in California to be paid to sell their eggs for scientific research. Jennifer Lahl, president of the Center for Bioethics and Culture (CBC), who testified […]

Today, over at First Things, Matthew Franck blogs about recent advertisements for egg donors that have been posted on the New Jersey Transit. As Franck notes, NJ Transit is full of young college-aged girls taking the train to and from Princeton, Rutgers, and other institutions. These young women are easily tempted by lucrative offers to […]

The world’s first baby has been born from “natural” IVF, and the story is making the news a lot these days. Not news to us at the CBC, is the fact that IVF carries risks and those risks can be significant both to the mother undergoing IVF and to the child born via IVF technologies. […]

It seems that fertility brokers — and clinics and the reproductive lawyers — are getting more aggressive these days. My hunch is that marriage debates are emboldening them to seek more liberal IVF laws in order to assist singles and same-sex couples in family building. Canada, which has laws I quite like (Canada prohibits the […]

AB 926 in California would permit Big Biotech to buy eggs from poor women to conduct human cloning and other experiments — potentially increasing the frequency of a practice commonly used in IVF that generally targets beautiful and brilliant college women. (New York already permits egg buying by biotech, resulting in the manufacture of the […]

In California, a bill that would allow researchers to pay women for their eggs is currently on the Governor’s desk, awaiting his signature or veto. At the CBC we have been very busy, working to make the very real risks of the egg retrieval process known so that both lawmakers and the public are fully […]

Back when California’s Proposition 71 was being pitched — which created the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) — opponents warned that making human cloning a state constitutional right would result in the exploitation of poor women for their eggs — needed in every attempt at SCNT cloning. Responding, supporters promised to prohibit egg buying […]

I learned about the first successful human cloning last Monday, but couldn’t write about it until Wednesday because of a news embargo. The peer reviewed paper in Cell was rushed to print because is a huge deal. But, much to my surprise, it only made mild news. There were two reasons for that I think. […]

The Los Angeles Times has waded in to the junk biology game, assuring us that no embryos are threatened in human cloning — WHEN THE WHOLE POINT OF HUMAN CLONING IS TO CREATE AN EMBRYO! From the editorial, “The Specter of Human Cloning:” The team at OHSU, which disclosed its work in a paper published […]